I lost my job as a teacher because I was once a call girl

Melissa Petro used sex work to pay her way through university, then gave it up for a job she loved as a teacher in the Bronx. But when she wrote about her experiences of prostitution, she was lambasted and then forced to resign. Here, she tells her story

Melissa Petro was forced to quit the job she loved as a teacher in New York, when it emerged that she had worked as a call girl to pay her way through college Photograph: pr/Melissa Petro

Melissa Petro

Wednesday 28 March 2012 04.05 EDT
First published on Wednesday 28 March 2012 04.05 EDT

There is a stereotype that current or former sex workers are so highly sexualized that all we think about is sex, but I've found that it is people with no experience in the sex industry whatsoever who can't get our business off their minds. In my experience, there was nothing sexy about prostitution. In the Huffington Post article that cost me my career as a public school teacher, I described my lifestyle as a prostitute as "physically demanding, emotionally taxing and spiritually bankrupting" and went on to say that "I hope to never again make the choice to trade sex for cash even as I risk my current job and social standing to speak out for an individual's right to do so." That risk proved far more real than I'd expected.

I became a sex worker at 19 while living in Mexico. At the time of my enrollment, Antioch College had what they called co-op, a program wherein students alternated academic terms on campus with terms of work or volunteer experience anywhere in the world. I was in Oaxaca on co-op, volunteering at a pre-school for indigenous street kids. It was my first time out of the States. One day at a grocery store, the credit card I had been living on was denied, having hit its limit. It was strip or go home, back to the claustrophobic suburbs I had worked so hard to escape. Going home did not seem like an option. Sex work, on the other hand, seemed an enticing option for reasons I could not then explain.

I would work in the sex industry as a stripper and, for a brief stint, as a call girl on Craig's List, on and off for nearly a decade, conducting ethnographic research on the industry and, eventually, writing in the first-person. From the beginning, writing and speaking about my experiences was my way of making sense of my chosen profession.

For many years, sex work was a solution. I could work and go to school. I could travel, live and work all over the world, participating in unpaid internships taken for granted as part of the undergraduate experience. As an undergraduate, I worked at two domestic violence shelters and as a rape crisis counselor. I went on to work in nonprofit development, grant-writing for a Somali women's health organization in London, UK and, later, for a nonprofit that ran after-school programs for disadvantaged girls here in New York City, where I eventually made my home. In graduate school, I worked as a consultant for a high-profile feminist organization while also working as a research assistant in the Pediatrics Department of a public hospital. During this same time, I sold sex.

Sex work defines the people who do it like no other occupation. Associated with deviance, drug use, mental illness and disease, to be labelled a "prostitute" is to be cast as the lowest of the low. No matter the realities of our experiences, we are thought of as victims and as inherently damaged, either before or as a result of our profession. Sex workers are considered a danger to society, unfit for serious public service. Worst of all: once a sex worker, always a whore.

Eventually, for me, it proved to be too much. Despite all it had afforded me, sex work was a far from perfect occupation. The stigma associated with the profession only exacerbated the rigors of the work.

Early 2007, I quit sex work for good and went back to school, earning a second Masters - this time in Childhood Education - and becoming a certified elementary school teacher. I worked as a teacher in New York City's South Bronx, teaching the visual arts and creative writing to kids in Kindergarten through to fifth grade for just over three years. At the same time, I continued to write and began publishing stories and articles about my former occupation. I wrote without pseudonym or apology, feeling it my Constitutional as well as human right to not have to hide my identity or suppress my opinion.

Though it's not surprising that the two identities came together, all my experience of social stigma hadn't prepared me for the response. On September 27, 2010, some weeks after I had published an op-ed in The Huffington Post, I woke up to a headline front and center on The NY Post: "Bronx teacher admits: I'm an ex-hooker." Instigated by the Post's front-page exclusive, I was ridiculed in the national press, publicly shamed by my former employer and ultimately forced to resign from the career that I worked hard for, and that I loved.

I've had many jobs in my lifetime. Still, the former occupation that concerns some potential employers most is the one not on my resume. Yes, I was a prostitute before I was a teacher. So what? The truth is that I'm far from unique. The truth is that there are many people like me, who choose or have chosen sex work in circumstances other than force - circumstances more complicated than the bogeyman pimp. My so-called advocates will tell you that we don't exist. I'm here to let you know that we do.

Melissa Petro is a freelance writer living in New York. She has written for The Huffington Post, Salon, Daily Beast, Reality Check and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor at xoJane and was a guest blogger at Bitch Magazine, where she authored a column critically analyzing representations of sex work in the media. She teaches creative writing at Gotham Writers Workshop and for The Red Umbrella Project, an organization that empowers sex workers to represent themselves.